Radicalism is the most consistent outworking of the post-Christian surge toward autonomy. It entails a clearcut secularization of existing religions and their embodiments in culture and society in order to clear the path for a modernization fully in accord with the demands of unrestricted freedom for human personality. This radicalism was articulated by Rousseau and Marx.

Liberalism also proceeds from the premise of the autonomy of the individual person but is more accommodating in the implementation of that premise, willing to accept a strategy of gradualism in its demands of secularization, modernization, and societal restructuration. John Locke is the founder of this tolerant liberalism.‘

Conservatism has likewise abandoned revealed religion as the basis for the social order, and views cultural values as the expression of the autonomous human will. But it differs from radicalism in its emphasis on the known values and institutions of the past over against the unknown values and structures of an uncharted future. Moreover, it differs from liberalism in its stress on the collective good within which the individual has to arrive at self-realization. Conservatism, fearful of chaos and destruction which demands for change may entail, clings to the old order as long as possible, and then willy-nilly adjusts itself to the changes which a liberal regime has achieved in the meantime. But all three ideologies within humanism agree on this, that the public realm is autonomous, secular, and that revealed religion must be confined to the privacy of home and church.